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By The Time You Finish This Book You Might Be Dead by Aaron Zimmerman
Changing and Improving Your Life Through CUTLAS by Eliot Greebee
ISBN 1-881471-22-5   $13.00 US  |  $17.95 CAN    256 pages

The Author has a website dedicated to his main character at greebee.com

Find the book on Amazon>



French philosophy forms a conceptual undercurrent for the book: the sophistic arguments of this
super-sized Sartre harken back to the perverse enlightenment logic of Sade, and Zimmerman's prose
sparkles when he engages Batialleian religious imagery (e.g., the "porcine holocaust," or Eliot
Greebee's meditations on death while floating drugged and naked upon the Atlantic). Zimmerman
draws a charmingly puerile Eliot, unable to wait for a moment, philosophically unable to delay
gratification, physically unable to resist consuming any potable on his person, whether candy,
drugs, or alcohol. Eliot is completely determined by consumer culture and dreams in "richer
colors, deep green the color of Astroturf, purple like grape Bubble-Yum, orange like Orange
Crush, red like Hawaiian Punch.Review of Contemporary Fiction

Brooklyn is the home of debut novelist Aaron Zimmerman, while the East Village is home to his fictional protagonist,
the overweight author Eliot Greebee, in
By the Time You Finish This Book You Might Be Dead. Chapters from the fictional
writer's fictional nonfiction guide,
Changing and Improving Your Life Through CUTLAS
, alternate with the narrative of
Greebee's antic pursuit of a maiden fair in this send-up of the self-help industry. (CUTLAS stands for Cost/benefit United-based
Transactional Life Analysis System, Greebee's proposed panacea for life's woes.) "There's a wonderful overlap," says publisher
Tod Thilleman. "It's a madcap adventure of 24 hours in New York, but the general thrust is actually very dark. This manic guy is
obviously in his own world. The action ends up in Coney Island."
Publishers Weekly, October 2003

Self-Improvement meets self-loathing, sex treads closer to dissolution than resolution, and places like
Las Vegas and Coney Island manifest the dark night of the American psyche. Aaron Zimmerman has
turned the longings of a bloated, horny, statistical pontificator into one fantastic novel.  Lauren Sanders, author of Kamikaze Lust

Funny and Deeply poignant, Zimmerman has masterfully combined a must read self-improvement manifesto
with a sexy, cocaine and alcohol fueled epic. A neon illuminated lost weekend among the damaged, vapid and disparaging. 
Donald Breckenridge, author of 6/2/95